Course Introduction
and Overview
Networked Life
Networked and Social Systems Engineering (NETS) 112
Fall 2013
Prof. Michael Kearns
A Little Experiment
An Artificial Social Network
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Consider yourself “connected” to everyone in this room who:
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Was born within a few hundred miles of the city or town you were born in
Or shares one of your favorite hobbies/interests/activities
Network is the aggregate of all these pairwise connections
Some observations
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Network is artificial, yet not unrelated to reality --- you really might meet people
due to proximity or shared interests
Network definition has “knobs” or “parameters” we can fiddle with
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Seems hard to guess at global structure
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Might be quite complicated
None of us has a bird’s eye view
Let’s experiment with navigation or search in this network
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Radius around your birthplace, strength of interest
But might expect certain qualitative properties to remain invariant (NYC density)
Communal goal: route a “message” from one part of the network to another
Try to do it in as few “hops” as possible
The Catch: everyone has only local information about the network
Existence of short paths (structure) vs. finding them (algorithm)
What happens when we go from 100 to 100 million to 7 billion?
Networks
(Social and Otherwise)
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Internet, Router Level
“Points” are physical machines
“Links” are physical wires
Interaction is electronic
A purely technological network?
• Points are people
• Links are social
• Interactions: relationships,
professional, virtual…
• How and why does structure form?
• Points are machines… but are
associated with people
• Links are physical… but may
depend on human preferences
• Interaction: content exchange
• Food for thought: free riding
Gnutella Peers
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Points are neurons
Links are axons
Interaction is electrical, but…
New field: “Connectomics”
Food for thought:
– Do neurons cooperate or compete?
The Human Brain
The Premise of Networked Life
• It makes sense to study these diverse networks together.
• Commonalities:
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Formation (distributed, bottom-up, “organic”,…)
Structure (individuals, groups, overall connectivity, robustness…)
Decentralization (control, administration, protection,…)
Strategic Behavior (economic, competition, free riding,…)
• An Emerging Science:
– Examining apparent similarities (and differences) between many social,
economic, biological and technological networked systems & organizations
– Importance of network effects in such systems
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How things are connected matters greatly
Details of interaction matter greatly
The metaphor of contagion in networks
Dynamics of economic and strategic interaction
– Quantitative and qualitative; experimental and theoretical
– Enabled by the revolution of instrumentation and measurement
Who’s Doing All This?
• Computer Scientists
– Understand and design complex, distributed networks
– View “competitive” decentralized systems as economies
• Social Scientists, Behavioral Psychologists, Economists
– Understand human behavior in “simple” settings
– Revised views of economic rationality in humans
– Theories and measurement of social networks
• Biologists
– Neural networks, gene regulatory networks,…
• Physicists and Mathematicians
– Interest and methods in complex systems
– Theories of macroscopic behavior (phase transitions)
• Communities are interacting and collaborating
Course Mission
• A network-centric examination of a wide range of social,
technological, biological, financial and political systems
• Examined via the tools and metaphors of:
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computer science
economics and finance
psychology and sociology
biology
mathematics and physics
• Emphasize the common themes
• Develop a new way of examining the world
A Communal Experiment
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Few similar undergraduate courses
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No formal technical prerequisites
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– (e.g. Cornell)
– greatly aided by recent books
– publications in Science, Nature, popular press etc.
– class demographics:
• majors: cog sci, communications, linguistics, history, econ, finance, psych,…
• freshmen through graduate students
Extensive web visualizations and demos
Participatory in-class and out-of-class social experiments
Course was initial inspiration and basis for the new Networked and
Social Systems Engineering (NETS) program
Course Outline
What is a Network?
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Networks as a collection of pairwise relationships
Measures: degree, diameter, clustering, centrality, expansion…
Examples of (un)familiar and important types of networks
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What makes a network interesting?
The distinction between structure and dynamics
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social networks
content networks
technological networks
biological networks
economic networks
Contagion and Tipping in Networks
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The dynamics of transmission
Viral spread and epidemic as metaphor
Amplification of the incremental
Connectors, hubs, and small worlds
Travers and Milgram’s famous experiment
Loosely based on Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”
Network Structure
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“Universal” structural properties of networks
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small diameter
clustering
mixtures of local and long-distance connectivity
heavy-tailed distributions
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random graph models
preferential attachment
small-world models
affiliation networks
all will be stochastic or randomized… for now
• Models of network formation
• Loosely based on Watts’ “Six Degrees”
The Web as Network
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Empirical structure of the web
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Web and blog communities
Web search:
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Web trust and network structure
– connected components and directionality
– diameter
– robustness measures
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hubs and authorities
the PageRank algorithm and organic search
gaming Google and the SEO industry
later: sponsored search
Towards Rational Dynamics
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Moving beyond the dynamics of contagion
Dynamics of self-interest and optimization
Introduction to equilibrium concepts
Emergence of the global from the local
The wisdom/madness of crowds:
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Loosely based on Schelling’s “Micromotives and Macrobehavior”
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thresholds and cascades
mathematical models of tipping
the market for lemons
private preferences and global segregation
Game Theory and Networks
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The mathematical language of strategic and economic behavior
Notions of equilibrium
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Multi-player games and markets
Evolutionary game theory
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Games and markets on networks
How does network structure influence strategic behavior?
Behavioral game theory and human subject studies
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Nash, correlated, cooperative, market, bargaining
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mimicking vs. optimizing
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classic example: the Ultimatum game
Behavioral Experiments
in Social Networks
– Analyses of recent years’ experiments…
– … and hopefully some new ones of your own.
Strategic Network Formation
• Network Science: stochastic models of formation
• But networks form for a reason…
• Examine game-theoretic formation:
– players must purchase the edges…
– …but accrue “participation benefits”
Sponsored Web Search
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Web as Network: PageRank and “organic” search
Sponsored search: formal markets in search phrases
Mechanism design and auctions
Competitive landscape (GOOG vs. MSFT vs. YHOO vs…)
Equilibrium studies
The economics of sponsored search
SEO vs. SEM
Internet Economics
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Internet basics
Selfish routing and The Price of Anarchy
Peer-to-peer as competitive economy
Paris Metro Pricing for QoS
Economic views of network security and spam
Course Mechanics
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Will make heavy use of course web page:
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No technical prerequisites!!!
Lectures:
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No recitations
Readings: mixture of general audience writings and articles from
the scientific literature
Three required texts:
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Assignments (~1/3 of grade)
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Midterm (~1/3 of grade)
Final exam (~1/3 of grade)
Possible we’ll throw in a project/paper assignment
– www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/teaching/NetworkedLife
– You will need good Internet access!
– slides provided; emphasis on concepts
– frequent demos, visualizations, and in-class experiments
– please be on time to lectures! (10:30)
– “The Tipping Point”, Gladwell
– “Six Degrees”, Watts
– “Micromotives and Macrobehavior”, Schelling
– computer/web exercises, short essays, quantitative problems
– collaboration is not permitted
First Assignment
• Due next lecture (Thursday 9/5)
– Simple background questionnaire
– Last-names exercise